The Republicans Can Win, but They Can't Lead

VOICES IN THE PARTY'S HEAD /// The story of the weekend is that the party's base is for the moment running amuck.

ORLANDO — Jon Huntsman, poor dear, truly is a lost soul. He came here this weekend, for the Florida presidential debate and the ensuing straw poll, running what appeared to be a complicated simulacrum of a national presidential campaign. This placed him in a subcategory of Republican contenders along with Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and, oddly enough, Rick Santorum, who is running a show not unlike Huntsman's, although Huntsman appears to be trying to get elected leader of the United States of America while Santorum seems to be angling for the job of patriarch of Antioch. Most everybody else — the rising Herman Cain, the faltering Michele Bachmann, and Ron Paul, who's always been really good at it — seems to be content with fashioning a cult of personality. And then there's Newt Gingrich, who is actually on an extended book tour.

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So, anyway, here's Huntsman — smart, educated, speaks fluent Mandarin — and he's sidling up to the proposition that he's the rational one in the house like a drunk edging toward his first AA meeting, talking to a crowd that, just minutes before, had given several wild ovations to a candidate for the U.S. Senate named Colonel Mike McAlister, who promised that he will fight the "threats facing America today." These apparently include the slow introduction into our judicial system of the principles of Sharia law, the ongoing threat of Communism to the structure of our families, and the implementation of... Agenda 21! At this point, I think Colonel Mike was auditioning to do movie trailers for Jerry Bruckheimer.

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But the hall ate it up, especially the part about Agenda 21, a rather unremarkable proposal from the United Nations regarding a plan for sustainable development of the world's resources and one that the United States Congress, a marginally sustainable ecosystem, has declined in its infinite wisdom to endorse anyway. Nonetheless, it was an article of faith in this hall that Agenda 21 — excuse me, Agenda 21! — is a plot by U.N. one-worlders to demolish American sovereignty, one farm at a time. In June, when President Obama signed an executive order creating the White House Rural Council, Glenn Beck's news site, The Blaze, spotted in that order the unmistakable signs of Agenda 21 and sent out a general alarm. This distracted the faithful from their fears about the NAFTA Superhighway, the nonexistent road that was the previously The Most Serious Threat to our national sovereignty, and a low bridge for Rick Perry, as we shall see. It also probably also sold a lot of gold for someone.

So Huntsman got up to speak and his problem was plain from the outset. He might speak fluent Mandarin, but he does not speak talk-show at all and his Paranoid is at a very rudimentary level. He assured his audience that he did not come here to pander to them. And then proceeded to make his way through a story in which some coincidences attending his family's adoption of a daughter from China were attributed to the Almighty. The story ended with his daughter's reply to someone who asked her whom it was that had found her in the vegetable market where she'd been abandoned.

"She replied, simply, 'Jesus,'" said Huntsman.

"We call her our little bean curd," he confided to the crowd, which was enough, as Dorothy Parker once put it, to make you fwow up.

Huntsman moved on and announced, proudly, that he was "the only candidate who unequivocally supports the Ryan Plan." This means the budget proposal put forth last spring by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, an apparent attempt to recreate in America the golden days before we elected that RINO bastard Theodore Roosevelt and it all went to hell. (The plan proved so popular generally that Ryan, while on vacation, possibly at Six Flags Over Dagny Taggart, had to call the local cops back home to eject from his district office constituents who disagreed with him.) Supporting Ryan's plan as a serious fiscal solution is no different that basing your foreign policy around Colonel Mike's delusions about Agenda 21! and all the other bogeymen jostling each other under his bed.

For all his subsequent admissions that he finds the overwhelming scientific consensus behind both climate change and evolution compelling, Huntsman found some lunacy with which he felt comfortable and he ran with it, poor soul. Not that it helped, of course. I have now been to two straw polls. Michele Bachmann won the first one and Herman Cain won the second one. I, for one, am beginning to have my doubts about the efficacy of straw polls as a way of determining presidents.

It is not possible to run for president as a Republican these days without at some level having to become a parody of yourself. Running within a radicalized, self-contained universe with its own private, physical laws and its own private history, with its own vocabulary and syntax that has to be learned from scratch almost daily, requires an ongoing manic re-invention that can do nothing but make the candidate look ridiculous to people outside that universe.

This is how we get Mitt Romney, with his $290 million, telling an audience that he doesn't "try to define who is rich and who is not rich." (Here's a hint, Mitt. You're rich. You're filthy, stinking rich. You reek of money. You belong on a card in a Monopoly set, okay? Buy a damn monocle already.)

Hell, this is how we get Mitt Romney, period, perhaps the most consummate fake in American political history, who once promised in a Senate race that he would be gayer than Ted Kennedy on the issues, and who, as governor, signed into law an insurance-friendly health-care reform act when he thought that would springboard him to the nomination in 2008, and who then reconfigured himself as a conservative in 2008 so convincingly that most of the rest of the field ended up wanting to spit at the mention of his name, and who is bringing that same act around the track once more this time, even though the health reform.

(Since he took his act national, Mitt's finest moment may well have been telling Brian Mooney of The Boston Globe that, when he was doing his Mormon mission in France, he really wanted to be fighting in Vietnam. In other words, rather than pestering wine-growers in Provence, Mitt really wanted to be humping the pig across the Central Highlands. This is so stupefyingly fraudulent as to be goddamn close to immortal.)

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It is possible — although certainly debatable — that Mitt Romney would be less of a phony if the Republican primary process were not controlled by the gibbering loon faction of the party. Unfortunately, as demonstrated clearly by the events in Florida just now, that remains the case. The obvious story of the whole weekend is that the party's base is for the moment running utterly amuck. It screamed to be covered. A Republican may well get elected president next year. But, whoever that is, first has to answer, constantly, to the voices in the party's head. It's exhausting work. It's already eaten Bachmann alive, and Herman Cain is next on the menu. Which is probably why so much energy seems to be going into the promotion of candidates who are not running. Right now, the non-candidate du jour is Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, who replaced Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana, who replaced Governor Rick Perry of Texas, who made the capital mistake of actually running, and who already has flummoxed and disappointed Bill Kristol, maker of public men and truly unnecessary wars.

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Kristol, of course, is the yeast behind the intellectual ferment that has produced, in order, Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin. A sane country party would be wondering at this point about a party that takes this person seriously as a political thinker and a public intellectual. If Bill Kristol went to the track, he'd bet on the fucking starting gate. Nevertheless, he is what passes for a wise man in a party that has surrendered utterly to its intellectual Id.

It's become so obvious that even the Ents on the editorial board of The New York Times bestirred themselves to wonder whether the Republican candidates realized how ridiculous they'd been made to sound. That may be the only question worth answering in the whole business. It certainly was the only story in Florida over the weekend. I mean, seriously, twice these past few days, I heard Rick Scott, the governor of Florida who looks like someone who should be firing laser blasts out of his eyes at the X Men, and who is approximately as popular in his state as the pythons currently breeding in the Everglades, talk about the importance of "principled leadership."

In 1997, Scott's principled leadership as CEO of the Columbia/HCA hospital chain resulted in the company's paying $1.7 billion to settle the Medicare and Medicaid fraud it had committed. Scott, who parachuted out with a $10 million severance package, claimed that, while he was unquestionably engaged in principled leadership, he was completely unaware that the company was systematically gorging itself on public money, trough and all. The second of these speeches, which blamed the governor's unpopularity on "liberal special interests" who were concerned only with gorging themselves on "bailouts," got Scott a long standing ovation and glowing reviews in the local papers. Thus did irony, for a moment, again smack its forehead and fall down.

But nowhere was this all more obvious than in the terrible, bad, awful weekend suffered by Rick Perry who, if he does nothing else, is proving himself to be the gen-u-wine shit-kicker George W. Bush only pretended to be. In the debate on Thursday night, both he and Romney fell afoul of having done, during their terms as governor of their respective states, something reasonably decent for the citizens therein. In Romney's case, of course, he passed a law that has resulted in 95 percent of the people in Massachusetts being covered by health insurance. In Perry's case, he allowed the children of undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition to the state universities in Texas.

It was fascinating to watch these two men size up their party, realize that they were impaled upon what they'd accomplished for thousands of their constituents back home, and then try to wriggle themselves free of all the good they'd done. Decency doesn't sell here. Pragmatism was remaindered long ago. This was an audience that thinks insurance-friendly health-care reform is half-past Trotsky, and that immigration reform means a higher wall, a deeper ditch, and larger caliber ammunition. Romney is slicker, of course, and he's been answering this question idiotically for going on five years now, so he was able to keep from being cornered on the issue out of long practice.

(His answer, of course, is a shallow lie. Having planned to run in 2008 as a Republican With A Plan on this issue, Romney now hides himself behind states' rights. What's good for Massachusetts may not be good everywhere, he says, implying that near-universal coverage, which is achievable in only a limited number of ways, all of them progressively less popular with the modern Republican party, is good in Boston, but not good in Biloxi. Oh, okay.)

On his best day, watching Perry try to think on his feet is rather like watching a hippo try to ice-skate. And this most assuredly was not his best day. He stumbled around, and he got slow-roasted by the other fantasts with whom he was sharing the stage to the point where, in what looked like terror and desperation, he blurted out something approximating the truth. People who didn't see the point in what he had done for those kids, well, Rick Perry thought they had no heart.

And that was pretty much the ballgame. Not only was he giving "breaks" to "illegals," but Perry was calling these great Christian souls, who wept when Rick Santorum talked about how a college kid whose girlfriend was considering an abortion changed her mind when she saw Rick on the floor of the Senate, talking for hours about banning what he called "partial-birth" abortion, and who smiled grandfatherly smiles at the mention of Jon Huntsman's little bean-curd of a daughter, heartless, just because they didn't want to give those "breaks" to all those "illegals." The weekend pivoted — toward Herman Cain! — almost immediately. That answer turned the hall against him, sent Bill Kristol to the fainting couch, and set a thousand heads turning in the direction of the governor of New Jersey, or whomever the next fool will be. This is a party capable of winning elections, but not leading a nation. To borrow a line from that noted Republican, Bobby Knight, this party couldn't lead a whore to bed.